Some of you may already know, I’m in the process of writing a book on improving your own service.

write by followtheseinstructions under CC BY-SA 2.0

I’m aiming the book at the people who work the process themselves, e.g.:

• nurses
• social workers
• claims adjusters
• HR/OD staff
• office managers
• office administrators
• hotel staff
• and their managers
• and change agents/analysts

As you can see, it’s not restricted to any industry, but will be most relevant to those working in service industries (whether from private, public and 3rd sector), so that should include:

• public sector
• health
• finance
• retail
• leisure
• legal

More accurately, the information in the book could be useful for any industry, however there already exist books for improving manufacturing production processes, so I have not covered them.

What’s the book about?

The focus is on improving a service without recourse to large consultancy fees and should work well on small changes locally within a team and managed changes with partner teams and organisations (e.g. suppliers and B2B clients). It’s heavily based on Lean concepts, using simple tools, but also includes a framework in which to manage the changes. I’ve borrowed from a number of methodologies and concepts to meld together a method that is suitable for the average worker and implementable in any service team.

Your Input

While I’m happy to write this book alone and for everyone to read, I really like the idea of the readers contributing their thoughts as I write it. This fits nicely with the Lean Startup model, so to accomplish this, I’ve listed the current table of contents below. Please have a read through the table of contents and let me know what you think. If you’re interested in this book, let me know what you want to learn from it.

Draft Table of Contents

Section I: Beginning
1    Introduction
2    Background
3    Where to Start?
Section II: Redesign
4    How to Redesign the Service
5    Detailed steps for How to Redesign a Service
Section III: Other Paths
6    Refocus service on customer
7    Only have today to make changes
8    Bottleneck Resolution
9    Reduce errors and improve service
10    Create a new service
11    Improve office layout
Section IV: Case Studies
12    A Real World Example: Capacity and Value Stream Owner
13    A Real World Example: Duty Role in Social Care
14    A Real World Example: Urgent Cases in Social Care
Section V: Extensions
15    Other sorting methods
16    Making it Happen
17    Managing the Change
Section VI: Continuing
18    Sustaining Change
Section VII: Reflections
19    Important Perspectives
20   Other Frameworks
21    A final piece of advice
Section VIII: Appendices
22    Appendix A: The Rules
23    Appendix B – Pocket Guide for Service Redesign
24    Appendix C – Indicators of Blocked Flow and Waste
25    Appendix D: Tools
26    Appendix E: References
27    Quotes